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Higgs Data Offers Joy and Pain For Particle Physicists
scibri writes "So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson, what's next? Well: 'There's going to be a huge massacre of theoretical ideas in the next couple of years,' predicts Joe Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. The data has shored up the standard model, but technicolor is dead and supersymmetry is starting to look pretty ropey now. Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks in the standard theory in the hopes of being the first to find a deeper truth about how the Universe works."
C'mon slashdot, you're better than that.
Yes I'm being funny (or trying to).
I for one welcome our Higgs Boson overlords and the subsequent replacement of String Theory with the more sound concept in Physics of Stringy Cheese Theory.
I'd like mine with mushrooms, thanks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
From what I understand it was only one single experiment that showed us something that we think is where/what the Higgs Boson would look like.
Has it been reproduced or confirmed?
Scientists using the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva have announced the discovery of a new subatomic particle to very high confidence that is consistent with what we expect the Higgs particle to look like.
That's not very definitive. Can anybody else around well versed in particle physics tell us if the Higgs has really been found or not?
I, for one, will pull my hand back from that pair of trousers!
Theorists are now poking at the mathematical chinks
I realize Asians are known for excelling at math, but do we really have to bring race into this?
I'm very, very sorry. I couldn't resist. I understand I'm a terrible person, you don't need to reply and tell me that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
>> poking at the mathematical chinks
Not all Maths graduate students are Chinese, you know.
poking at the mathematical chinks
I hope I'm not coming across as prudish, but isn't that illegal?
Really? The stereotype is bad enough, but now we're physically harassing them too?
I love how authors at Slashdot will resort to using phrases like "Pretty much!!" to more or less gloss over facts like how the Higgs Boson is still nowhere near being anything more material than a theoretical particle resting on pure conjecture made up by actual existing humans who are merely uncomfortable with how dark the universe is. Religious believe in God, too, and are "Pretty much!!" sure there's no doubt God ever existed, though there's no concrete evidence that God does or ever did. I believe Stephen Hawking had something to say about Religion, along the lines that it's a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark. I'm surprised he didn't state something similar in dismissal of the Higgs Boson and the rest of the Dark Matter bandwagon.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I predict, over the next two years, what's going to come out of this is the following:
Physicists will have poked holes in most all the prevailing Standard Model-compatible theories, and will start talking about the inadequacies of the LHC and how we need a much bigger collider to prove or disprove the existence of those elusive super-partner particles required by supersymmetry.
#DeleteChrome
TF is technicolor?
Every new discovery of the past few decades has supposedly "killed" SUSY, but every time it makes a comeback with a modification to avert whatever problem the observation caused. Other theories do the same, to a slightly lesser extent.
I don't see why Technicolor is dead. The Nature article makes the claim that it's because Technicolor is Higgsless, but that's something of a falsehood. Technicolor lacks an elementary Higgs, because the role played by the elementary Higgs in the Standard Model is instead played by a composite particle. As far as I can tell it's perfectly possible that the bosonic state at 125GeV is a composite rather than elementary Higgs.
(FD: I'm a PhD student with a thesis area based around technicolor)
Learning about the universe by smashing particles together, over and over millions of times, is like learning how to text message by smashing a cell phone into the pavement over and over again. Sure, you see all the broken pieces, so you know more than before but you don't really understand how a cell phone works, or how a cell phone is used to send a text message.
I understand that it would be frustrating to see years of labor on a theory go down the tubes, but at its root the finding means that we now have a slightly better understanding of reality. I would think that for many if not most people in the field, if the implications are as stated in the summary, this is exciting because we have a better idea of what direction to theorize in. Falsification is just as if not more important than making hypotheses.
Your brain is not a computer.
So now that we've pretty much found the Higgs Boson
Maybe the Higgs Boson wanted us to think we found it.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
consistent with The Higgs Boson
The short version of what scientists are *actually* saying boils down to:
We theorised where IT would be and when we finally looked THERE we found SOMETHING which isn't Absolutely Not IT.
Reports I've read (forgot URLs, sue me) indicated the result found was NOT exactly as expected, but also not so massively different that they'd be sure it was NOT The Higgs.
More like:
Scientist1: Yup, that's the Higgs!
Scientist2: But I thought you said it'd have black spots not very very dark brown.
Scientist1: Well if we'd solved everything then what are we going to do after that?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
One of the reasons to believe they have found the Higgs boson and not some other particle is that the decay relative rates for each type of decay are pretty close to what the theory suggests.
Actually that is not really true because we do not have enough statistics to measure these rates with any accuracy. In fact the "most likely" value for diphoton rates for both ATLAS and CMS are quite a bit higher than the Standard Model predicts but the accuracy is sufficiently low that they are not yet inconsistent with the SM values. So really the rate measurements are currently far too inaccurate to have any idea whether this is a Higgs boson or not but things are improving rapidly as we gain statistics.
What is far more important at the moment are the decay channel observations. Since it decays into photons, W and Z bosons we know it must be either a spin-0 or spin-2 particle and it cannot be a fermion (spin-0.5). The Higgs should be spin-0 so this is consistent but not conclusive. Essentially it decays into the particles it should do and it _potentially_ has the correct spin. We can get a more accurate determination of the spin i.e. whether it is spin-0 or spin-2 by looking at the angle between the two leptons (electron or muon) produced in the WW decay channel - expect results from ATLAS and CMS on this soon.
However by the end of the year the rate measurements should be a lot more accurate and things will possibly start to get interesting if the current diphoton rates stay where they are but we end up with less uncertainty on the measurement.
This is worth a watch...
http://vimeo.com/41038445
Enjoy!
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
String Theory has failed to even generate a single definitive prediction after 44 years of hype.
ST is gonna go down in history as one of the biggest wastes of money and human potential ever.
It's equivalent to religion since nothing in ST is (currently?) falsifiable and you have to believe in it to work on it.
"Joy and pain"? Jesus, what are they doing, tying the boson in a knot and putting it up their bums? (I guess it would have to be a "boson's knot").
Instead of the God Particle, they could call the "Oh God! Particle".
[note: I only make this kind of off-color joke because it's past 9pm and the children have all gone to bed. I call this the "safe harbor" hours, when normal FCC rules moderating online behavior are relaxed, like a sphincter with a Higgs Boson in it. Thanks to these safe harbor rules, constitutionally-protected free speech rights of adults are balanced with the need to protect children from harmful content, like the word "fuck" and references to tying massive particles in knots and putting them up one's bum and then pulling it out slowly as climax is achieved (thus the expression "string theory"). Two physicist doing this while standing face to face are called a "Hardon Collider", named for the famous Scottish physicist Sir Ivan Hardon (1847-1903) who first posited that there's nothing else to do while waiting for the experiment to finish and there were so few female physicists back then that, hey, what happens in the lab stays in the lab. Tragically one of his experiments exploded while Hardon and a lab assistant were engaged in this act of outrage and since they had their pants down both of them got kilt.]
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, are the physicists happy and sad at the same time? Makes sense... and not.
sociology with a few arbitrary symmetry laws.
For those who want to pretend they understand:
It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to Ï or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly!
On the numerical value of α[ed: alpha], the fine-structure constant, p. 129
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
PS - Whiners may wish to note Taco's response to a question in yesteday's Reddit AMA regarding lack of Unicode on Slashdot:
Ihmhi 3 points 2 days ago
One last one because I can't resist!
Why did you guys get rid of ASCII/unicode support? Sure there were some nasty ASCII posts, but it also removed the possibility for creativity. It seems a bit stifling at times, and it's funny to me that there's a website in 2012 that can't handle, say, Japanese characters.
CmdrTaco 4 points 2 days ago
Jerks ruined it for everyone.
ref
from every other article I've read on the topic, which say that the measured mass of the Higgs boson is exactly where it should be if the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model is correct; and too low for any non-supersymmetric theory.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/07/why-125-gev-higgs-boson-isnt-quite.html?m=1
Theorist #1: "We have analyzed the Higgs Boson data, and the answer is 42."
Theorists #2, 3, 4 ... 500 :"Oh #$!@. Now the bloody question changed!"
Let's say you have an atom consisting of 1 Proton (1P). You also have an atom consisting of 1 proton and 2 neutrons (1P 2N). Let's say you bang these together to create 2P2N.
This apparently causes a decrease in mass, which is converted to energy.
Since mass is apparently simply drag in the Higgs field, could it be said that there is something about 2P2N that makes its drag smaller than the sum of its parts, hence the rest is released as energy? That lead is the ultimate smooth sailer in the Higgs field, and as atoms on the lower side come together or on the higher side split apart, they enjoy a stepwise decrease in their drag?
That in E=mc2, the important bit is really the c^2, because in order to create particles with mass you need not only the corresponding building blocks, but also c^2 of energy to couple the created particles to the Higgs field? Why does this coupling take the speed of light squared and not cubed?
Writing as an engineer not a physicist, what does it actually mean though.
For the sake of keeping things simple, I'm going to assume in this post that they have found the Higgs boson (lets pretend they walked up to it and looked between its legs to check).
Now.
What does it actually mean for me as an engineer?
From what I've read they've shown that something that something they were assuming to exist for their model to work, does in fact exist. Where does that actually get them besides saying "Well chaps. It looks like the model is right. As you were." (or what ever the Swiss version is).
Granted they can write plenty of conference papers and journal articles and get more grants etc, but aside from that what?
What I'm trying to ask, is, how does showing that something they were relying on existing actually exists helpful?
The data obtained by two independent experiments (CMS and ATLAS, both at the LHC) is in excellent agreement for the mass of the particle. The results are also coherent with those obtained by two experiments (CDF and D0) based at the Fermilab. Something has been found, with a very high statistical relevance (five sigma level, so there is only a chance in a few million that this is a fluctuation). Whether this something is indeed the Higgs boson as predicted depends on its detailed behaviour, so it will take more time to find out. It does however look like it, or a close relative...
Obviously, there is a deeper theory because the Standard Model makes no attempt to explain why the elementary particles have exactly the masses they do, just to mention one huge gap of which this armchair physics watcher is aware. It's about time for another Einstein to come along and deduce it.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
While disproving the existence of God is effectively impossible - proving it does exist would actually quite simple, provided you had His/Her/Its/Their cooperation. The fact that their is no credible evidence the existence of God suggests that either:
1) It doesn't exist
2) It doesn't desire to prove Its existence, or
3) It's incapable of proving Its existence
Considering we're talking about a being who most claim created the universe and intervenes in peoples life in ways both subtle and miraculous, number (3) seems unlikely - even just having one of his chosen messengers take part in a double-blind psionics test while God read out the cards to them would be enough to give the question serious scientific merit.
Now (2) could very easily be the case, and is in fact perfectly consistent with some faiths. But in that case I would suggest that either It doesn't actually care about our worship, codes of conduct, or the other stuff religions tend to obsess over, or It's a complete jerk: "Yeah, I know it's been a hundred generations or so since I bothered to offer any evidence that I even exist, much less which of the hundreds of continuously-mutating religions I endorse, but you didn't follow the right one so you're getting eternally condemned anyway".
Which leaves (1) as the default assumption. Either God doesn't exist, or It wishes us to be free to conduct our lives as though it does not - in which case spreading the "Good Word", especially through coercion, would seem to run counter to God's will.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Theoretical research still takes people and computers; both of which cost money. A research team consisting of two PHDs and four grad students can easily cost $1Mill. a year. Multiply that by the number of interested research groups and the possible waste can be huge. Are you really willing to risk wasting millions of dollars in very scarce funding for theoretical research just because one can not wait to be sure that the single experiment was not an anomaly?
Here is a quote from CERN Director General Rolf Heuer;
“The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”
Even the CERN director does not claim to have found the Higgs boson; just a particle consistent with it. As it is said earlier in the article, it could be Higgs or it could be something more exotic. At least replicate the experiment first.
Duhhhhh now we need an even bigger, costlier particle accelerator!
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
The recent discovery on July 4th of the God Particle proves the Unification Theory that eluded Albert Einstein all his life. He is up there looking down now and smiling. Find the new twist on E = mc2 at: http://godparticlephysicsfordummies.com/ The Author